[Rob Tisinai of the blog Waking Up Now has written an excellent series of critiques of Robert George’s anti-SSM arguments. I’m very happy that Rob’s series will now be reprinted here on “Alas.” Enjoy! –Amp]
Over the next few weeks I’ll publish a series of posts analyzing Robert George’s article, “What is Marriage?”
Robert George authored The Manhattan Declaration and is the Founding Chairman of Maggie Gallagher’s National Organization for Marriage, but don’t let that fool you. He’s an intellectual heavyweight, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. A recent profile in the New York Times dubbed him America’s “most influential conservative Christian thinker,” and described his reputation:
Karl Rove told me he considers George a rising star on the right and a leading voice in persuading President George W. Bush to restrict embryonic stem-cell research. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told me he numbers George among the most-talked-about thinkers in conservative legal circles. And Newt Gingrich called him “an important and growing influence” on the conservative movement, especially on matters like abortion and marriage…
George has assumed his mantle as the reigning brain of the Christian right.
George published “What is Marriage” in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. It’s been hailed as “a definitive defense of the institution of traditional marriage.” Just two months after its publication, it became the most downloaded paper of the past year at the Social Science Research Network.
The article’s over 40 pages long, and my analysis will match that easily. I’ll post it in chunks every two or three days.
Blogging is inherently presumptuous: Look at me! I wrote this! You should read it! But it feels especially presumptuous asking people to read a long, multi-part rebuttal to an academic article. I hope you’ll do it anyway, for several reasons.
- George’s article has substance. If you’re ever frustrated — or even embarrassed — by having to deal with arguments from the likes of Brian Brown and Bryan Fischer, arguments so ludicrous they fall apart on their own, then Robert George will seem like a whole new world. Even if his brain gets it entirely wrong, it’s still a powerful brain.
- George’s article may improve your own thinking about marriage equality. There’s little challenge or growth in dealing with ridiculous opponents. Wrestling with George’s arguments forced me to think more deeply about same-sex marriage and marriage in general. You might find this, too.
- George’s article will be influential. You know those talking points spouted by foes of equality? The next round of them are being harvested from George’s work. Knowing his work will arm you against them.
- I could use your help. Robert George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and I’m…not. I’d like to pull these rebuttal posts into a single downloadable file, something that would benefit from your insights and corrections to this series of posts.
So that starts tomorrow. In the meantime, you can download George’s article here if you want a head start.
I’m looking forward to your responses to this very much. I’ve skimmed through their article, and found critical, rhetorical flaws that I am gleefully highlighting as I go.
Their attempts to examine the phenomenon of gay marriage teleologically fails because they both oversimplify the institution and ignores its true history, focusing on child welfare and ‘morality’ when it ought to be focusing on contractual obligation and benefits.
They feign toward a “universal” understanding of marriage (as far as culture and religion) but make assumptions that are clearly christian in origin. And in this sentence: “antimiscegenation was about whom to allow to marry, not what marriage was essentially about” they have unwittingly dehumanised homosexuals and shown us their cards; they have nothing to fight with but puffed up pseudo-academic rhetoric from an era that is fast fading away.
But we must continue to analyse these rhetorical moves, as you point out. We will not rely on teleology alone. We will see the rhetorical appeals they make and crush them with their own words.
focusing on child welfare
don’t know if I’ll have time to read the article with a family therapy/social justice conference coming up, but if that’s a cornerstone of his argument, he loses right there. The last link farm had this article in it, which summarized the relevant research perfectly:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2009.00678.x/full
I’m underwhelmed by the intellectual power of the manuscript. Let’s just start with the first sentence of the abstract: “…we argue that as a moral reality, marriage is the union of a man and a woman who make a permanent and exclusive commitment to each other of the type that is naturally fulfilled by bearing and rearing children together, and renewed by acts that constitute the behavioral part of the process of reproduction.”
Just for fun, let’s accept their definition of marriage as a given. So, marriage is a “union of a man and a woman” then clearly gay marriage makes no sense. So far so good. But if it is a “permanent and exclusive commitment” then what are we to make of the 50% of marriages that fail? Aren’t they a far greater threat to “true marriage” than the unknown percentage of the 5-10% of the population that is gay that might want to marry? They’re concentrating their efforts in entirely the wrong place if they believe this statement.
Then there’s the “naturally fulfilled by bearing and rearing children together” part. There are numerous problems with this argument. Among them: 1. Many gay and lesbian couples are bearing and raising children together. These children are not the genetic offspring of both partners but it is hardly unknown for heterosexual partners to raise the children of their partners by former relationships or to adopt children genetically related to neither. Or to have children through artificial insemination with sperm not from the male partner (or even eggs not from the female partner.) So, no absolute difference of type here. 2. What about marriages between infertile couples? They are quite common one way or another. My mother, father, and grandmother all had second marriages in which there was not even the remote possibility of reproduction. The fact that I can name 3 people in my immediate family who had such marriages-all heterosexual-should give some idea of the relative frequency of such marriages compared to the likely number of gay marriages. Again, George is not concentrating on the worst “threat” if he believes his proported definition of marriage.
Finally, to my knowledge, there has never, in any society, Christian or otherwise, been a requirement that children be born of a marriage to make it a “true” marriage. Quite the contrary. If a young couple marries and fails to have children, they are still married and, prior to divorce, were given no legal and socially acceptable option for having children. Traditionally, the purpose of marriage is more to restrict reproduction by demanding that couples (especially women) reproduce with this person and no other-and if you can’t reproduce together you’re just SOL.
The whole argument reminds me of the “pro-life” argument about how life begins at conception. They claim that they believe that life begins at conception and that the death of a fetus is a tragedy (and a crime if it is intentional), but they don’t act on that belief: few, if any, pro-lifers call for serious investigation into the cause of miscarriage and fewer still are willing to pay for said work, despite miscarriage being a far greater threat than abortion. Similarly, George appears to ignore divorce, infertile marriages, etc, to concentrate on the much lesser “threat” of gay marriage. If he and his coauthors believed their thesis they would surely be concentrating on the greater threat of divorce and inappropriate heterosexual marriage. I conclude that they are using this twisted definition which is without basis in tradition, law, or theology in order to justify their own prejudices.
Oh boy, this thing is painful. I’m about halfway through it, and JEEZ LOUISE WHAT A PILE OF TURDS. Looking forward to reading a series of responses that will, presumably, display a reasonable level of critical thinking skills.
The real problem here, philosophically speaking, is George’s allegiance to ideals. I mean, he’s literally “idealistic,” in the same sense that, say, Plato was. And that’s fucking lousy.
Ideals are all well and good, but they end up elevating abstract concepts (like ‘the purpose of marriage’ or the ‘comprehensive union of body’) over the lived existence of human beings. And, since ‘the purpose of marriage’ and the ‘comprehensive union of body’ are neither able to feel pain nor pleasure, we end up trading actual pain and suffering for … nothing. Which is evil.
One of my guiding principles is that ideas are never more important than people. Never, never, never. Elevating the abstract above the concrete is the road down which ideological cleansing, gulags, and death camps lie. Once we decide that it’s okay to sacrifice people for ideals, pretty soon we decide that it’s okay to sacrifice people who don’t match the ideals, etc, etc.
But, then, that’s why I’m a proud pragmatist (CSP! Dewey!), and why I think Plato (and George) are full of crap.
—Myca
Dianne, I am not defending the guy’s argument, because I find it a failure on purely logical terms (When will the soft heads learn that it’s “Not B then Not A” that follow from “If A then B”, and thus understand the difference between necessary and sufficient?)
But your approach to attacking his argument is flawed. The guy looks like a Platonist to me. His definition is something like the ‘ideal’ of marriage, and the fact that not all (or even any) marriages fit it is not a problem for him. Your approach is more Aristotelian, and there is no firm agreement among philosophers that one approach is superior…
Of course, as far as I am concerned, all philosophers are irrelevant jaw flappers who should be replaced with engineers. From an engineering point of view:
1. Same sex marriage has not been demonstrated to hurt anyone.
2. Is clearly desired by a nonzero number of people.
3. Old god fearing farts are dying off, removing obstacles to its legalization.
So, things look good for same sex marriage. I have no personal stake in it (If I have kids, and if one turns out gay, it will be still a decade before it matters, and by then California will have legalized guy marriage)
So I am perfectly happy not doing anything about it except sneering at these speaking against it, and ridiculing them in the way that I know will upset them the most – by pointing out its inevitability, by disdaining the flaws in their argument, or by speculating about the pleasures of gay sex.
But thank you for this thread, which I will be following carefully. It’s great to have someone else to do the heavy lifting (especially when it comes to philosophy) so that I can just plagiarize the arguments against Professor George.
— edit —
Myca ninja’d me on not one, but three points. There is something wrong with the world if he and I think so much alike.
His definition is something like the ‘ideal’ of marriage, and the fact that not all (or even any) marriages fit it is not a problem for him
Even so, his “ideal marriage” is defined as a life long bond between one man and one woman that produces children. Given that definition of an ideal marriage, I see no logical reason for declaring a lifelong bond between two men or two women which produces children (though not in the same way as a relationship between one man and one woman usually does) as less like the ideal than a temporary relationship between one man and one woman or a life long bond between one man and one woman that produces no children. Perhaps he gives some at least formally logical explanation for why the first is less like the “ideal marriage” than the second two, but I haven’t seen it yet from the parts I’ve read.
And I quite agree with your approach to same sex marriage, but will defend philosophy in general as a useful way of producing a framework for thinking about the world. The currently prevalent philosophy, after all, has allowed a lot of engineering to take place.